Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke. Glory to you, O Lord.
Jesus came down with the 12 and stood on a stretch of level ground with a great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon.
And raising his eyes toward his disciples, he said, blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude and insult you and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice, leap for joy on that day.
Behold, your reward will be great in heaven, for their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.
But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this, the Gospel of the Lord.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Thanks to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Well, if you didn't bring your opera glasses, this is pineapple upside down cake and I'm going to walk all the way over here to show the people in this corner.
Well, anyone who knew me during my time as pastor knew that I was not a a cake person.
I am a pie person.
And my most favorite pie is pecan.
And I even had pecan pies on my birthdays.
Candle wax on pecan is not the greatest thing, but pecan pie just overshadows little wax in your throat.
But if I had to deal with cake, my favorite would be pineapple upside down cake.
Now if you can trust Wikipedia, Pineapple upside down cake has been around since the twenties.
Supposedly in 1924 there was a woman's cookbook in Seattle, Washington published out in Seattle, Washington to raise funds and there was a recipe in print for pineapple upside down cake. And then in some Woman's Day magazine gold medal in 1925 had a full page recipe for pineapple upside down cake. And of course we can't forget dole pineapple. They had a contest on the best pineapple dessert that could be made and apparently the upside down cake won.
Well, the reality is in pineapple upside down cake. What it was on the bottom is now on the top.
That's the gospel. I can go sit down.
What was on the bottom now on the top.
We hear in this Gospel reading Luke's version of the Beatitudes.
It is markedly different than St. Matthew's remember, Matthew seats Jesus up on a hillside and there are multiple Beatitudes. And that's one of the differences.
The second one is that he speaks in the third person.
Blessed are they.
In Luke's Gospel there are only four Beatitudes and they are delivered in the second person.
Now there are some people in this room don't know what I'm talking talking about, but I had to diagram sentences and I know the first person, second person and third person, etc. Etc. You know?
Yeah.
And they don't even teach cursive anymore. Boo hoo.
But the reality Jesus is directing his words to his audience.
Blessed are you who are poor.
Blessed are you who are hungry.
Blessed are you who are weeping.
Blessed are you who are hated.
On top of that, Luke not only has the disciples gathered and people from Judea and Jerusalem, but from Tyre and Sidon, just in case you don't know where that is. In the old days it was Phoenicia, it's now Lebanon.
So Luke opens the great gate to all nations.
It's not just the Jews who are listening to the words of Jesus.
And the reality in biblical times, if you were poor, hungry, sad or hated, God didn't like you.
You were not blessed.
So Jesus really turns the social fabric upside down.
Because if you were wealthy, had lots of property, had lots of food, had lots of great people telling you how wonderful you are and how great you looked, God loved you.
That was eye opening and ear opening for the disciples because that was not the norm. It was upside down.
And to go on, we have to look at our own day and age.
I went to St. Valentine grade school and the good Felician sister, Sister Ferraria, if we were out of whack just a little bit, she'd say, borja grudge, God's going to get you.
And that was the biblical notion, you are punished.
In my ministry over these decades, I have found that it still is alive and well in the hearts of all of us.
I've met with people who will say to me, why is God doing this to me?
What did I do wrong that this is happening?
It is the gospel.
Jesus is saying, because you are hard up against it doesn't mean that you are not blessed.
And sooner or later that blessing will come to fruition.
And the people needed to hear that because so many of them were poor and hungry and saddened and hated.
All those foreigners who were there listening to Jesus from Tyre and Sidon, all those gentile pagans hate it.
And yet he is telling all of them gathered, you are blessed.
So as we come here today and we may find ourselves hard up against something, know that it isn't God out meeting his justice against us.
He promises to walk with us and promises us grace and goodness.
Part of the ugliness does not come from God, it seems to come from one another.
As Jeremiah told us in that first reading, when we put our stock in human beings and in things, we miss the point.
So the next time you're out and about and you happen to see pineapple upside down cake, remember God turns our darkness into light.
What was on the bottom is now on the.
